Along with the continuous development of society, the Internet has developed rapidly and has become an indispensable part of our daily lives. Thousands of people make online purchases and browse news, etc., daily. In an existing computer network, a user may register many different IDs on websites, and log into different service networks for performing different tasks. Determining which terminals are used by these IDs for login is very crucial for efficiently performing business control, user management, risk control and commercial intelligent analysis.
Accordingly, a number of terminal identification technologies have emerged in existing technologies. Existing identification technologies basically collect data associated with a terminal used by a user when the user accesses a service network (such as a website or a platform), and determine a terminal from which the data originates based on this data using servers or computers in the network. A most widely adopted of which is to use a control component associated with a browser to obtain a MAC address for achieving identification. However, MAC addresses are obtained from a registration list, and are prone to tampering and forgery by people. Therefore, there exists a problem of inaccuracy or even falsity of an MAC address so obtained.
A Chinese patent publication with a publication number CN103024090A discloses a different method and system for terminal identification. This method uses software information associated with a browser or hardware information obtained from a hardware IO layer of a terminal as a machine identification code of the terminal, and identifies the terminal based on this machine identification code. During identification, the terminal fetches a machine identification code thereof for sending to a service network. The service network matches the machine identification code to data information associated with different terminals that is stored in a database, and regards a best-matched terminal as an identified terminal.
This machine-identification-code-based terminal identification method obtains hardware information from a hardware IO layer, which is more accurate and more difficult to be intercepted and tampered with as compared to a MAC address. However, as a terminal needs to fetch a machine identification code during each request, and a service network needs to compute degrees of matching of the machine identification code with data information of terminals in a database during identification, this method consumes a large amount of communication and computation resources, and thus deteriorates the user experience. Furthermore, the fetched machine identification code is prone to decompilation, interception and breaching during processes of transmission and storage, thus being unfavorable to privacy protection of an identification code of a user machine.